Manufacturing and Selling Electronic Badges #Badges #Manufacturing #Design
David Capper is writing a series of articles documenting the process of designing, prototyping, manufacturing and selling electronic badges, often seen at conventions.
I wanted to experiment with JLC PCB’s assembly service – whilst I’ve designed and manufactured bare PCBs before before placing and soldering components manually, I’ve got some future projects in mind that will be impractical to solder up by hand due to both the quantity and size of components. It’s kind of amazing how cheap this service is when you think about what’s involved but it’s still expensive enough that it can be a bit daunting handing over your money then waiting to find out whether you’ve made some mistake that will ruin the end result.
I had a quick scan of Etsy to look at the kinds of things people were successfully selling that I could make. I found a couple of examples of people making electronic pin badges – the perfect project! These mostly consisted of LEDs with either a random or pre-set flashing pattern on a novelty shaped board. These looked alright to me, but I wanted to try something a bit more interactive and meaningful that I could sell for enough money to make a sensible margin on a small number of initial units.
Read all the steps and lessons learned in the post here.
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